June 2014

TMC President’s Message:

A Summer Greeting

We want to send greetings to everyone
in our TMC family and wish you well. The summer time has arrived, school is
out, summer plans are in place and many of us can look forward to special,
hopefully relaxed, times for recreation and recharging our batteries. I hope
that you are among them.

The Men’s Council can celebrate a year since we began our efforts to
reinvigorate the work the Triangle Men’s Center began. We are happy to report
that we can list some clear accomplishments. Many of those accomplishments
concern the work needed to make the organization operational again and included
such things as establishing a Board, selecting a new name and revising the
Bylaws of the organization. We also held the first TMC elections since the
reorganization began. You can go to the TMC web pages to see our current Board
members and its officers.

One of the major accomplishments of
the past year has been to completely revise the TMC web and social media
presence. Jim Neill and Larry Sorkin have spent untold thankless hours
designing and updating those pages (www.TheMensCouncil.org). There is a wealth of
information there and we all need to take the time to visit them regularly and
to express our gratitude to them for the contributions that they have made.

Along with our thanks to these two, I
would like to mention the quiet, steady work of another person. Over the years
John Sullivan has been the Treasurer and financial officer year after year
since at least 2008 when I began attending the Gatherings again after a decade
hiatus. Since there have not been any elections or new TMC Boards formed for
quite a long while, he has faithfully carried on without respite. Because of
his stewardship the TMC has maintained a positive balance bank account of
sufficient size to ensure that the one most important event, the Spring
Gathering of Men, would be able to occur from year to year. In addition, he has
made sure that the financial business of the TMC has been reliably carried out
over the course of each year. Because he does his work quietly and without
fanfare, most of us are not even aware of his contributions. Believe me when I
say that we owe John a major debt of gratitude.

Finally, in terms of accomplishments
I think that almost all who attended this year’s Gathering in April would agree that this was one of the
most successful we have experienced in recent memory. The feedback was
uniformly positive and we have many people to thank for that. It was an amazing cooperative group effort
involving so many people that I cannot list everyone. Thanks are in order to
all in the planning who spent hours of time meeting, first at Larry’s place in Taylorsville in
October, and then via phone conference calls over the course of the six months
leading up to the Gathering. Special thanks go to the Saturday night planning
committee that spent extra time meeting to plan the Saturday night ritual, to
those who sat in front and facilitated the large group sessions, to the small
group facilitators and to those who led workshops. The consistent high quality
in each of these areas over the course of the weekend combined to give
participants an experience that will be remembered for a long time.

We can also celebrate the fact that
we had the highest number of attendees, 84, in recent memory. More important
around 25% of these attendees were new to the Gathering. We can only hope that
this trend will continue in the future.

We will be starting the planning
process for next year’s
Gathering in October. The weekend is not yet settled, but if you are interested
in participating, you can contact Larry Sorkin to be sure he includes you on
his distribution list. Mark the dates for next year’s Gathering on your calendar: April 17-19, 2015. We hope
that you will be able to join us for that event.

As we look ahead to the coming months
we hope you will all keep an eye out for the events that will be occurring.
Here are a few of the TMC related events to watch for:

•Monthly TMC events coordinated by Dave Davenport
and John Hall

•August 9, the Catawba Men’s Gathering in Charlotte

•September 27, the Fall Feast at Soltera in
Durham

•November 20, author Robert Mitchell on the
Warrior Archetype and Trauma of Mechanized Warfare in Chapel Hill at Church of
Reconciliation

Visit the TMC web pages to learn
details about these events and other events of interest to men that we try to
keep up with around the state and the country. We invite you to inform us of
any gatherings, meetings or workshops that you learn about that you think would
be of interest to men and which we have not had occasion to post on the TMC web
pages. We need your help to provide as complete a list of resources for men as
possible.

We hope that you have an enjoyable
summer and look forward to serving your needs in whatever way possible in the
future.

God speed and peace be with you,

Bron Skinner

President, The Men’s Council

THE MEN'S COUNCIL (formerly the Triangle Men's Center) is a 501c3 tax exempt organization.